Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet : An Autobiography, by Charles Kingsley

Chapter 2.

The Tailor’s Workroom.

Have you done laughing! Then I will tell you how the thing came to pass.

My father had a brother, who had steadily risen in life, in proportion as my father fell. They had both begun life
in a grocer’s shop. My father saved enough to marry, when of middle age, a woman of his own years, and set up a little
shop, where there were far too many such already, in the hope — to him, as to the rest of the world, quite just and
innocent — of drawing away as much as possible of his neighbours’ custom. He failed, died — as so many small tradesmen
do — of bad debts and a broken heart, and left us beggars. His brother, more prudent, had, in the meantime, risen to be
foreman; then he married, on the strength of his handsome person, his master’s blooming widow; and rose and rose, year
by year, till, at the time of which I speak, he was owner of a first-rate grocery establishment in the City, and a
pleasant villa near Herne Hill, and had a son, a year or two older than myself, at King’s College, preparing for
Cambridge and the Church — that being now-a-days the approved method of converting a tradesman’s son into a gentleman —
whereof let artisans, and gentlemen also, take note.

My aristocratic readers — if I ever get any, which I pray God I may — may be surprised at so great an inequality of
fortune between two cousins; but the thing is common in our class. In the higher ranks, a difference in income implies
none in education or manners, and the poor “gentleman” is a fit companion for dukes and princes — thanks to the old
usages of Norman chivalry, which after all were a democratic protest against the sovereignty, if not of rank, at least
of money. The knight, however penniless, was the prince’s equal, even his superior, from whose hands he must receive
knighthood; and the “squire of low degree,” who honourably earned his spurs, rose also into that guild, whose
qualifications, however barbaric, were still higher ones than any which the pocket gives. But in the commercial classes
money most truly and fearfully “makes the man.” A difference in income, as you go lower, makes more and more difference
in the supply of the common necessaries of life; and worse — in education and manners, in all which polishes the man,
till you may see often, as in my case, one cousin a Cambridge undergraduate, and the other a tailor’s journeyman.

My uncle one day came down to visit us, resplendent in a black velvet waistcoat, thick gold chain, and acres of
shirt-front; and I and Susan were turned to feed on our own curiosity and awe in the back-yard, while he and my mother
were closeted together for an hour or so in the living-room. When he was gone, my mother called me in; and with eyes
which would have been tearful had she allowed herself such a weakness before us, told me very solemnly and slowly, as
if to impress upon me the awfulness of the matter, that I was to be sent to a tailor’s workrooms the next day.

And an awful step it was in her eyes, as she laid her hands on my head and murmured to herself, “Behold, I send you
forth as a lamb in the midst of wolves. Be ye, therefore, wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” And then, rising
hastily to conceal her own emotion, fled upstairs, where we could hear her throw herself on her knees by the bedside,
and sob piteously.

That evening was spent dolefully enough, in a sermon of warnings against all manner of sins and temptations, the
very names of which I had never heard, but to which, as she informed me, I was by my fallen nature altogether prone:
and right enough was she in so saying, though as often happens, the temptations from which I was in real danger were
just the ones of which she had no notion — fighting more or less extinct Satans, as Mr. Carlyle says, and quite
unconscious of the real, modern, man-devouring Satan close at her elbow.

To me, in spite of all the terror which she tried to awaken in me, the change was not unwelcome; at all events, it
promised me food for my eyes and my ears — some escape from the narrow cage in which, though I hardly dare confess it
to myself, I was beginning to pine. Little I dreamt to what a darker cage I was to be translated! Not that I accuse my
uncle of neglect or cruelty, though the thing was altogether of his commanding. He was as generous to us as society
required him to be. We were entirely dependent on him, as my mother told me then for the first time, for support. And
had he not a right to dispose of my person, having bought it by an allowance to my mother of five-and-twenty pounds a
year? I did not forget that fact; the thought of my dependence on him rankled in me, till it almost bred hatred in me
to a man who had certainly never done or meant anything to me but in kindness. For what could he make me but a tailor —
or a shoemaker? A pale, consumptive, rickety, weakly boy, all forehead and no muscle — have not clothes and shoes been
from time immemorial the appointed work of such? The fact that that weakly frame is generally compensated by a
proportionally increased activity of brain, is too unimportant to enter into the calculations of the great King
Laissez-faire. Well, my dear Society, it is you that suffer for the mistake, after all, more than we. If you do tether
your cleverest artisans on tailors’ shopboards and cobblers’ benches, and they — as sedentary folk will — fall a
thinking, and come to strange conclusions thereby, they really ought to be much more thankful to you than you are to
them. If Thomas Cooper had passed his first five-and-twenty years at the plough tail instead of the shoemaker’s awl,
many words would have been left unsaid which, once spoken, working men are not likely to forget.

With a beating heart I shambled along by my mother’s side next day to Mr. Smith’s shop, in a street off Piccadilly;
and stood by her side, just within the door, waiting till some one would condescend to speak to us, and wondering when
the time would come when I, like the gentleman who skipped up and down the shop, should shine glorious in
patent-leather boots, and a blue satin tie sprigged with gold.

Two personages, both equally magnificent, stood talking with their backs to us; and my mother, in doubt, like
myself, as to which of them was the tailor, at last summoned up courage to address the wrong one, by asking if he were
Mr. Smith.

The person addressed answered by a most polite smile and bow, and assured her that he had not that honour; while the
other he-he’ed, evidently a little flattered by the mistake, and then uttered in a tremendous voice these words:

“I have nothing for you, my good woman — go. Mr. Elliot! how did you come to allow these people to get into the
establishment?”

“My name is Locke, sir, and I was to bring my son here this morning.”

“Oh — ah! — Mr. Elliot, see to these persons. As I was saying, my lard, the crimson velvet suit, about thirty-five
guineas. By-the-by, that coat ours? I thought so — idea grand and light — masses well broken — very fine chiaroscuro
about the whole — an aristocratic wrinkle just above the hips — which I flatter myself no one but myself and my friend
Mr. Cooke really do understand. The vapid smoothness of the door dummy, my lard, should be confined to the regions of
the Strand. Mr. Elliot, where are you? Just be so good as to show his lardship that lovely new thing in drab and
blue foncé. Ah! your lardship can’t wait. — Now, my good woman, is this the young man?”

“Yes,” said my mother: “and — and — God deal so with you, sir, as you deal with the widow and the orphan.”

“Oh — ah — that will depend very much, I should say, on how the widow and the orphan deal with me. Mr. Elliot, take
this person into the office and transact the little formalities with her, Jones, take the young man up-stairs to the
work-room.”

I stumbled after Mr. Jones up a dark, narrow, iron staircase till we emerged through a trap-door into a garret at
the top of the house. I recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to work — perhaps through life! A
low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly
smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps
of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness
that made me shudder. The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in
streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook of chimney-tops and smoke. The conductor handed me over to one of
the men.

“Here, Crossthwaite, take this younker and make a tailor of him. Keep him next you, and prick him up with your
needle if he shirks.”

He disappeared down the trap-door, and mechanically, as if in a dream, I sat down by the man and listened to his
instructions, kindly enough bestowed. But I did not remain in peace two minutes. A burst of chatter rose as the foreman
vanished, and a tall, bloated, sharp-nosed young man next me bawled in my ear —

“I shouldn’t have thought so,” answered I with a naïveté which raised a laugh, and dashed the tall man for
a moment.

“Yer don’t? then I’ll tell yer. A cause we’re a top of the house in the first place, and next place yer’ll die here
six months sooner nor if yer worked in the room below. Aint that logic and science, Orator?” appealing to
Crossthwaite.

“Why?” asked I.

“A cause you get all the other floors’ stinks up here as well as your own. Concentrated essence of man’s flesh, is
this here as you’re a breathing. Cellar workroom we calls Rheumatic Ward, because of the damp. Ground-floor’s Fever
Ward — them as don’t get typhus gets dysentery, and them as don’t get dysentery gets typhus — your nose’d tell yer why
if you opened the back windy. First floor’s Ashmy Ward — don’t you hear ‘um now through the cracks in the boards, a
puffing away like a nest of young locomotives? And this here most august and upper-crust cockloft is the Conscrumptive
Hospital. First you begins to cough, then you proceeds to expectorate — spittoons, as you see, perwided free gracious
for nothing — fined a kivarten if you spits on the floor —

And the ribald lay down on his back, stretched himself out, and pretended to die in a fit of coughing, which last
was, alas! no counterfeit, while poor I, shocked and bewildered, let my tears fall fast upon my knees.

“Fine him a pot!” roared one, “for talking about kicking the bucket. He’s a nice young man to keep a cove’s spirits
up, and talk about ‘a short life and a merry one.’ Here comes the heavy. Hand it here to take the taste of that
fellow’s talk out of my mouth.”

“Well, my young’un,” recommenced my tormentor, “and how do you like your company?”

“Is that anything good to eat? Give me some on it if it is — it’ll save me washing my face.” And he took hold of my
hair and pulled my head back.

“I’ll tell you what, Jemmy Downes,” said Crossthwaite, in a voice which made him draw back, “if you don’t drop that,
I’ll give you such a taste of my tongue as shall turn you blue.”

“You’d better try it on then. Do — only just now — if you please.”

“Be quiet, you fool!” said another. “You’re a pretty fellow to chaff the orator. He’ll slang you up the chimney
afore you can get your shoes on.”

“Fine him a kivarten for quarrelling,” cried another; and the bully subsided into a minute’s silence, after a
sotto voce—“Blow temperance, and blow all Chartists, say I!” and then delivered himself of his feelings in a
doggerel song:

“Some folks leads coves a dance,

With their pledge of temperance,

And their plans for donkey sociation;

And their pockets full they crams

By their patriotic flams,

And then swears ’tis for the good of the nation.

“But I don’t care two inions

For political opinions,

While I can stand my heavy and my quartern;

For to drown dull care within,

In baccy, beer, and gin,

Is the prime of a working-tailor’s fortin!

“There’s common sense for yer now; hand the pot here.”

I recollect nothing more of that day, except that I bent myself to my work with assiduity enough to earn praises
from Crossthwaite. It was to be done, and I did it. The only virtue I ever possessed (if virtue it be) is the power of
absorbing my whole heart and mind in the pursuit of the moment, however dull or trivial, if there be good reason why it
should be pursued at all.

I owe, too, an apology to my readers for introducing all this ribaldry. God knows, it is as little to my taste as it
can be to theirs, but the thing exists; and those who live, if not by, yet still besides such a state of things, ought
to know what the men are like to whose labour, ay, lifeblood, they own their luxuries. They are “their brothers’
keepers,” let them deny it as they will. Thank God, many are finding that out; and the morals of the working tailors,
as well as of other classes of artisans, are rapidly improving: a change which has been brought about partly by the
wisdom and kindness of a few master tailors, who have built workshops fit for human beings, and have resolutely stood
out against the iniquitous and destructive alterations in the system of employment. Among them I may, and will, whether
they like it or not, make honourable mention of Mr. Willis, of St. James’s Street, and Mr. Stultz, of Bond Street.

But nine-tenths of the improvement has been owing, not to the masters, but to the men themselves; and who among
them, my aristocratic readers, do you think, have been the great preachers and practisers of temperance, thrift,
charity, self-respect, and education. Who? — shriek not in your Belgravian saloons — the Chartists; the communist
Chartists: upon whom you and your venal press heap every kind of cowardly execration and ribald slander. You have found
out many things since Peterloo; add that fact to the number.

It may seem strange that I did not tell my mother into what a pandemonium I had fallen, and got her to deliver me;
but a delicacy, which was not all evil, kept me back; I shrank from seeming to dislike to earn my daily bread, and
still more from seeming to object to what she had appointed for me. Her will had been always law; it seemed a deadly
sin to dispute it. I took for granted, too, that she knew what the place was like, and that, therefore, it must be
right for me. And when I came home at night, and got back to my beloved missionary stories, I gathered materials enough
to occupy my thoughts during the next day’s work, and make me blind and deaf to all the evil around me. My mother, poor
dear creature, would have denounced my day-dreams sternly enough, had she known of their existence; but were they not
holy angels from heaven? guardians sent by that Father, whom I had been taught not to believe in, to shield my
senses from pollution?

I was ashamed, too, to mention to my mother the wickedness which I saw and heard. With the delicacy of an innocent
boy, I almost imputed the very witnessing of it as a sin to myself; and soon I began to be ashamed of more than the
mere sitting by and hearing. I found myself gradually learning slang-insolence, laughing at coarse jokes, taking part
in angry conversations; my moral tone was gradually becoming lower; but yet the habit of prayer remained, and every
night at my bedside, when I prayed to “be converted and made a child of God,” I prayed that the same mercy might be
extended to my fellow-workmen, “if they belonged to the number of the elect.” Those prayers may have been answered in a
wider and deeper sense than I then thought of.

But, altogether, I felt myself in a most distracted, rudderless state. My mother’s advice I felt daily less and less
inclined to ask. A gulf was opening between us; we were moving in two different worlds, and she saw it, and imputed it
to me as a sin; and was the more cold to me by day, and prayed for me (as I knew afterwards) the more passionately
while I slept. But help or teacher I had none. I knew not that I had a Father in heaven. How could He be my Father till
I was converted? I was a child of the Devil, they told me; and now and then I felt inclined to take them at their word,
and behave like one. No sympathizing face looked on me out of the wide heaven — off the wide earth, none. I was all
boiling with new hopes, new temptations, new passions, new sorrows, and “I looked to the right hand and to the left,
and no man cared for my soul.”

I had felt myself from the first strangely drawn towards Crossthwaite, carefully as he seemed to avoid me, except to
give me business directions in the workroom. He alone had shown me any kindness; and he, too, alone was untainted with
the sin around him. Silent, moody, and preoccupied, he was yet the king of the room. His opinion was always asked, and
listened to. His eye always cowed the ribald and the blasphemer; his songs, when he rarely broke out into merriment,
were always rapturously applauded. Men hated, and yet respected him. I shrank from him at first, when I heard him
called a Chartist; for my dim notions of that class were, that they were a very wicked set of people, who wanted to
kill all the soldiers and policemen and respectable people, and rob all the shops of their contents. But, Chartist or
none, Crossthwaite fascinated me. I often found myself neglecting my work to study his face. I liked him, too, because
he was as I was — small, pale, and weakly. He might have been five-and-twenty; but his looks, like those of too many a
working man, were rather those of a man of forty. Wild grey eyes gleamed out from under huge knitted brows, and a
perpendicular wall of brain, too large for his puny body. He was not only, I soon discovered, a water-drinker, but a
strict “vegetarian” also; to which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the almost preternatural clearness, volubility,
and sensitiveness of his mind. But whether from his ascetic habits, or the unhealthiness of his trade, the marks of
ill-health were upon him; and his sallow cheek, and ever-working lip, proclaimed too surely —

The fiery soul which, working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy body to decay;

And o’er informed the tenement of clay.

I longed to open my heart to him. Instinctively I felt that he was a kindred spirit. Often, turning round suddenly
in the workroom, I caught him watching me with an expression which seemed to say, “Poor boy, and art thou too one of
us? Hast thou too to fight with poverty and guidelessness, and the cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, as I have
done!” But when I tried to speak to him earnestly, his manner was peremptory and repellent. It was well for me that so
it was — well for me, I see now, that it was not from him my mind received the first lessons in self-development. For
guides did come to me in good time, though not such, perhaps, as either my mother or my readers would have chosen for
me.

My great desire now was to get knowledge. By getting that I fancied, as most self-educated men are apt to do, 1
should surely get wisdom. Books, I thought, would tell me all I needed. But where to get the books? And which? I had
exhausted our small stock at home; I was sick and tired, without knowing why, of their narrow conventional view of
everything. After all, I had been reading them all along, not for their doctrines but for their facts, and knew not
where to find more, except in forbidden paths. I dare not ask my mother for books, for I dare not confess to her that
religious ones were just what I did not want; and all history, poetry, science, I had been accustomed to hear spoken of
as “carnal learning, human philosophy,” more or less diabolic and ruinous to the soul. So, as usually happens in this
life —“By the law was the knowledge of sin”— and unnatural restrictions on the development of the human spirit only
associated with guilt of conscience, what ought to have been an innocent and necessary blessing.

My poor mother, not singular in her mistake, had sent me forth, out of an unconscious paradise into the evil world,
without allowing me even the sad strength which comes from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; she
expected in me the innocence of the dove, as if that was possible on such an earth as this, without the wisdom of the
serpent to support it. She forbade me strictly to stop and look into the windows of print shops, and I strictly obeyed
her. But she forbade me, too, to read any book which I had not first shown her; and that restriction, reasonable enough
in the abstract, practically meant, in the case of a poor boy like myself, reading no books at all. And then came my
first act of disobedience, the parent of many more. Bitterly have I repented it, and bitterly been punished. Yet,
strange contradiction! I dare not wish it undone. But such is the great law of life. Punished for our sins we surely
are; and yet how often they become our blessings, teaching us that which nothing else can teach us! Nothing else? One
says so. Rich parents, I suppose, say so, when they send their sons to public schools “to learn life.” We working men
have too often no other teacher than our own errors. But surely, surely, the rich ought to have been able to discover
some mode of education in which knowledge may be acquired without the price of conscience, Yet they have not; and we
must not complain of them for not giving such a one to the working man when they have not yet even given it to their
own children.

In a street through which I used to walk homeward was an old book shop, piled and fringed outside and in with books
of every age, size, and colour. And here I at last summoned courage to stop, and timidly and stealthily taking out some
volume whose title attracted me, snatch hastily a few pages and hasten on, half fearful of being called on to purchase,
half ashamed of a desire which I fancied every one else considered as unlawful as my mother did. Sometimes I was lucky
enough to find the same volume several days running, and to take up the subject where I had left it off; and thus I
contrived to hurry through a great deal of “Childe Harold,” “Lara,” and the “Corsair”— a new world of wonders to me.
They fed, those poems, both my health and my diseases; while they gave me, little of them as I could understand, a
thousand new notions about scenery and man, a sense of poetic melody and luxuriance as yet utterly unknown. They chimed
in with all my discontent, my melancholy, my thirst after any life of action and excitement, however frivolous, insane,
or even worse. I forgot the Corsair’s sinful trade in his free and daring life; rather, I honestly eliminated the bad
element — in which, God knows, I took no delight — and kept the good one. However that might be, the innocent — guilty
pleasure grew on me day by day. Innocent, because human — guilty, because disobedient. But have I not paid the
penalty?

One evening, however, I fell accidentally on a new book —“The Life and Poems of J. Bethune.” I opened the story of
his life — became interested, absorbed — and there I stood, I know not how long, on the greasy pavement, heedless of
the passers who thrust me right and left, reading by the flaring gas-light that sad history of labour, sorrow, and
death. — How the Highland cotter, in spite of disease, penury, starvation itself, and the daily struggle to earn his
bread by digging and ditching, educated himself — how he toiled unceasingly with his hands — how he wrote his poems in
secret on dirty scraps of paper and old leaves of books — how thus he wore himself out, manful and godly, “bating not a
jot of heart or hope,” till the weak flesh would bear no more; and the noble spirit, unrecognized by the lord of the
soil, returned to God who gave it. I seemed to see in his history a sad presage of my own. If he, stronger, more
self-restrained, more righteous far than ever I could be, had died thus unknown, unassisted, in the stern battle with
social disadvantages, what must be my lot?

And tears of sympathy, rather than of selfish fear, fell fast upon the book.

I went in, for there was a geniality in the tone to which I was unaccustomed, and something whispered to me the hope
of an adventure, as indeed it proved to be, if an event deserves that name which decided the course of my whole
destiny.

“What war ye greeting about, then? What was the book?”

“‘Bethune’s Life and Poems,’ sir,” I said. “And certainly they did affect me very much.”

Though unaccustomed to the Scotch accent, I could make out enough of this speech to be in nowise consoled by it. But
the old man turned the conversation by asking me abruptly my name, and trade, and family.

“Vara weel; then books I’ll lend ye, after I’ve had a crack wi’ Crossthwaite aboot ye, gin I find his opinion o’ ye
satisfactory. Come to me the day after tomorrow. An’ mind, here are my rules:— a’ damage done to a book to be paid for,
or na mair books lent; ye’ll mind to take no books without leave; specially ye’ll mind no to read in bed o’ nights —
industrious folks ought to be sleeping’ betimes, an’ I’d no be a party to burning puir weans in their beds; and lastly,
ye’ll observe not to read mair than five books at once.”

I assured him that I thought such a thing impossible; but he smiled in his saturnine way, and said —

“We’ll see this day fortnight. Now, then, I’ve observed ye for a month past over that aristocratic Byron’s poems.
And I’m willing to teach the young idea how to shoot — but no to shoot itself; so ye’ll just leave alane that vinegary,
soul-destroying trash, and I’ll lend ye, gin I hear a gude report of ye, ‘The Paradise Lost,’ o’ John Milton — a gran’
classic model; and for the doctrine o’t, it’s just aboot as gude as ye’ll hear elsewhere the noo. So gang your gate,
and tell John Crossthwaite, privately, auld Sandy Mackaye wad like to see him the morn’s night.”

I went home in wonder and delight. Books! books! books! I should have my fill of them at last. And when I said my
prayers at night, I thanked God for this unexpected boon; and then remembered that my mother had forbidden it. That
thought checked the thanks, but not the pleasure. Oh, parents! are there not real sins enough in the world already,
without your defiling it, over and above, by inventing new ones?